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This invention relates generally to asset management and, more particularly, to methods and systems for assisting health care organizations to manage medical imaging equipment inventories and usage.
Management health care costs has been the focus of many health care organizations. Although the costs associated with medical imaging equipment are significant for at least some health care organizations, there currently is no known systems or methods for facilitating automated analysis to facilitate identifying the optimum use of such equipment. For example, a hospital or clinic typically has a mix of imaging equipment, such as CT, MRI, and X-Ray machines. For each machine, numerous procedures can be performed, and for each procedure, there typically is a desired completion time. Until now, no known systems or methods perform a substantially automated analysis to facilitate determinations with respect to whether the imaging equipment is being used in an optimum manner. Without such systems and methods, health care organizations may have extreme difficulty in improving and achieving optimum efficiency in its use of imaging equipment.
In addition, there currently are no known systems and methods which facilitate managing imaging assets. Particularly, in order to determine present and future equipment needs, it would be desirable to provide systems and methods for forecasting future patient and procedure volumes, and then, using such forecasts, facilitate determining future equipment needs. Of course, in making such determinations, the current imaging equipment inventory and efficiency should be known.
It would be desirable to provide automated systems or methods for analyzing imaging equipment usage so that health care organizations can attempt to optimize equipment usage. It also would be desirable to provide such systems and methods which facilitate managing imaging assets, including forecasting future patient and procedure volumes.
These and other objects may be attained by a system for generating reports and data useful in making optimization recommendations with respect to medical imaging equipment of a health care organization. In one embodiment, the system hardware platform is a workstation which includes a processor coupled to a keyboard so that a user can provide data and commands to the processor. The processor also is coupled to a display and a printer for providing outputs to the user. The workstation also includes a memory coupled to the processor and, as described below in more detail, data utilized in connection with analysis and report generation is stored in the memory.
The processor is programmed to execute a number of operations relating to report generation. More particularly, data related to a particular site is collected, and the data typically relates to the equipment, or inventory, present at the site as well as the various types of procedures, and the number of procedures, performed at the site. After collecting the necessary data, the system then determines, or calculates, various summaries, assessments, capacity utilization, needs assessment, needs comparison, equipment requirements comparison, and procedural efficiency. After making such determinations, the system builds and formats various reports and graphs for presenting the determinations to the user. The data presented in the reports and graphs can then be used to generate optimization recommendations.
The system described above facilitates collection of the necessary data to enable a health care organization better understand its operations and equipment, and also generates various reports so that such an organization can focus its efforts on improving efficiency and planning for future needs.